Dr Nyla Ali Khan

I had the honor of being invited to the Oklahoma Conference of Churches 2017 Annual Dinner by the Reverend William Tabbernee. This event was held at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, which, to my mind, symbolizes the dynamism of cultures and histories in the American West, […]

I have written several articles on the increase in polarization and fragmentation that we have been witnessing in the wake of the presidential campaign and the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the US. The rhetoric of acrimony that is palpable the world over undermines the traditional notion of self-determination, rule of […]

Although the Congress party has formed governments in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chattisgarh following the defeat of the BJP in all three states, the revival of secularism is not a necessary corollary. The tendency to equate secularism with the Congress is rather naïve. A couple of days ago, a court in India upheld the conviction […]

The killing of seven civilians in Kashmir today exposes subcontinental democracy as a brutal façade and continues to instigate disgruntlement and antipathy towards democratic procedures and institutions in the state. In accounts of insurgency and counter insurgency operations in the J & K, where are the genuine traumas and tribulations of the people? Do we […]

One of the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize 2018 is Nadia Murad, an Iraqi Yazidi activist, for her effort “to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” The Norwegian Nobel Committee underscored, “This year marks a decade since the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1820 (2008), which […]

I posit that similar to nineteenth-century French feminist leaders, my maternal grandmother Begum Akbar Jehan Abdullah, along with other women members of the Women’s Self-Defence Corps (WSDC) of Jammu and Kashmir, “used the concept of motherhood figuratively to refer to women’s spiritual qualities and social mission” (Allen 104). In doing so, they articulated a new […]

After the first edition of Islam, Women, and the Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan, published in June 2009,was reviewed by several Kashmiri academics, it was pointed out to me that autonomy was an inadequate solution.The intractability of the Kashmir conflict has made advocates of conflict resolution rather wary of applying a seemingly workable […]

My impressions regarding Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s arrest and the Kashmir Conspiracy Case became more coherent after reading the monograph by Y. D. Gundevia. The Chicago Daily Tribune was just as unequivocal in its criticism of the Sheikh’s detention as other international commentators and political analysts. The editorial in the Tribune underlined that the Sheikh’s arrest […]

Raised in Kashmir in the 1970s and the 1980s, I instinctively knew that my parents would protect me from the shackles of restrictive traditions and from the pigeonholes of modernity. My own wariness of statism, perhaps, stems from my Mother’s fraught childhood and youth. Her father, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, reigned as Prime Minister of the […]

Why is gender violence such a consistent feature of the insurgency and counterinsurgency that have wrenched apart the Indian subcontinent for decades? The equation of the native woman to the motherland in nationalist rhetoric has, in recent times, become more forceful. In effect, the native woman is constructed as a trough within which male aspirations […]